eral Grant won.

Boldness did it. The canal abandoned, one red night fleet and transports
swept around the bend and passed the city's heights, on a red river. The
Parrotts and the Dahlgrens roared, and the high bluffs flung out the
sound over the empty swamp land.

Then there came the landing below, and the cutting loose from a base
--unheard of. Corps behind cursed corps ahead for sweeping the country
clear of forage. Battles were fought. Confederate generals in Mississippi
were bewildered.

One night, while crossing with his regiment a pontoon bridge, Stephen
Brice heard a shout raised on the farther shore. Sitting together on a
log under a torch, two men in slouch hats were silhouetted. That one
talking with rapid gestures was General Sherman. The impassive profile of
the other, the close-cropped beard and the firmly held cigar that seemed
to go with it,--Stephen recognized as that of the strange Captain Grant
who had stood beside him in the street by the Arsenal He had not changed
a whit. Motionless, he watched corps after corps splash by, artillery,
cavalry, and infantry, nor gave any sign that he heard their plaudits.

At length the army came up behind the city to a place primeval, where the
face of the earth was sore and tortured, worn into deep gorges by the
rains, and flung up in great mounds. Stripped of the green magnolias and
the cane, the banks of clay stood forth in hideous yellow nakedness, save
for a lonely stunted growth, or a bare trunk that still stood tottering
on the edge of a banks its pitiful withered roots reaching out below. The
May weather was already sickly hot.

First of all there was a murderous assault, and a still more murderous
repulse. Three times the besiegers charged, sank their color staffs into
the redoubts, and three times were driven back. Then the blue army
settled into the earth and folded into the ravines. Three days in that
narrow space between the lines lay the dead and wounded suffering untold
agonies in the moist heat. Then came a truce to bury the dead, to bring
back what was left of the living.

The doomed city had no rest. Like clockwork from the Mississippi's banks
beyond came the boom and shriek of the coehorns on the barges. The big
shells hung for an instant in the air like birds of prey, and then could
be seen swooping down here and there, while now and anon a shaft of smoke
rose straight to the sky, the black monument of a home.

Here was work in the trenches